Mission Impossible

Get everything out of your head except now.

As we begin looking at Ephesians 3:20-21, it’s important we look at the very first word, which conveys its crucial context: now.

I understand that the current conditions in your life may not be your favorite thing to dwell on right now. You may have become more adept at concentrating on earlier, back before some of these parts of your life started looking this way. Or on later, distracting yourself with the possibilities of the future. You may have grown accustomed to looking the other direction, daydreaming your life away, too overwhelmed to even try figuring out solutions anymore for your present reality.

No matter your current reality and the circumstances that describe it, there is a time to start connecting it all with God’s infinite and indescribable ability. And that time, my friend . . . is now.

Paul used this little bitty adverb as a tiny connector between that huge, blue ocean of vocabulary he’d been pumping out for three chapters and the tightly packed dynamo of this one-line doxology. Now is the link between the impossible and the possible. The unmanageable and the divinely doable. In light of all that other stuff God has already accomplished—a whole eternity’s worth of wisdom and planning, of insurmountable odds and ultimate victory—here’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for.

Now.

Somehow we’ve trained ourselves to disconnect our current reality and God’s present ability. Somehow we overlook the nearness of God when we are caught up in the cadence of life, dancing to the drumbeat of our personal issues. We stay too tired or angry or frazzled to remember that God can work, and is currently working, on our behalf right now.

Paul wanted to bridge that gap, to bring an end to the separation anxiety that leaves us feeling discouraged and overwhelmed, unseen and uncared for. So he purposely, strategically, intentionally used a word whose purpose in the Greek language was to connect what he had previously said in Ephesians 2 and 3 with what he was about to say in the verses you and I are concentrating on together. So maybe if we back up a bit in the passage and in time, we can get a more detailed look at what Paul was up to.

Paul told the Ephesians that Jews and Gentiles, age-old enemies in every conceivable aspect of the term, were no longer on opposite cultural planets. By virtue of the gospel—the peace and reconciliation to God they’d received through the Messiah’s sacrifice—they had become a third race of people known as the “body of Christ.” And their unity as believers was designed to show the world that if God could do this—could so such an impossible thing—He truly could do anything.

You need to understand that the very idea of Jews and Gentiles getting along, respecting each other, cooperating together, was a completely foreign idea. The fissures ran too deep. The haughtiness and hostility were too ingrained. No one had ever run for office on a Jew-and-Gentile reconciliation platform. They hated the ground the other had walked on. Their aims and desires were mutually exclusive. By a country mile.

Until Jesus. Jesus changed everything. He still changes everything. Through the life and death of the Messiah, a “mystery” race had been conceived—which is exactly what Paul calls it in Ephesians 3:3 and in numerous other places.

It was done.

The only thing left was for these people to begin accepting by faith that what God had already accomplished, they could actually apply, not because of their power but because of His.

As impossible as it sounded for this long-standing feud to finally end in a truce, Paul declared this reality their new reality. This now reality. He wanted them to bring all of this conflict to all of God’s power, right then and there, then stand back to see what God could do.

And God did it.

And if God was able to do that—the ultimate impossibility in most of their minds—then would anything else remain that He couldn’t do for them? For you?